Jacked-Up: EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC with ACX Cooling

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Overclocking the EVGA GTX 780 with ACX

We spent a little time overclocking the EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC with ACX cooling to see what kind of additional frequency headroom it had left under its hood. For these tests, we used the latest edition of EVGA's Precision X GPU tweaking utility, which is designed to work with the newest GeForces.

Overclocking a Kepler-based GeForce GTX series graphics card requires a bit more tweaking then previous-gen products, due to all of the new options available and the complexities associated with GPU Boost 2.0. Sometimes, you’ll find that increasing a particular voltage or frequency may appear to function properly, when in fact performance decreases due to errors or throttling. You may also find that the actual GPU Boost clock may travel above or below the designated offset value when the power and/or temperature targets are also increased.

We did a few things when experimenting with overclocked speeds on the EVGA GTX 780. First we tried the most basic option available--we simply changed the temperature target from the default 80'C and increased it to 90'C to see what kind of impact it would have on performance. Then, to push things much further, we increased the power and temperature targets to 106% and 94'C, respectively, and also increased the GPU and Memory clock offsets and ran a few tests.

Overclocking The EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC

Tweakin' The GPU

Ultimately we were able to take our EVGA GeForce GTX 780 SC with ACX cooling up to a 1228MHz GPU clock with 6328MHz (effective) memory. With the card overclocked, it showed a marked improvement in performance in both games we tested, increasing its lead over the Titan and inching closer to the GeForce GTX 690.